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Pavel: A Don’t Miss Lecture

I’m no bumpkin (although I play one on our local cable channel in “Bumpkin’s Buddies” — a half-hour celebration of bumpkindom with all things bumpkin) but I was amazed by the effects I saw and even more amazed by the simple solution.

The title of Pavel’s current tour is “How to Invent a New Trick.” In his hands, it seems almost too easy. After all, says Pavel, there are only so many effects in the world. As Arthur Buckley pointed out in his <iPrinciples of Deception</i, a magician can do a transposition, a vanish, an appearance, and so on. So how would someone of meager talent and very small brain such as me, ‘invent’ a new trick?

The master suggests and demonstrates how to use a previously invented method to accomplish a different effect. He demonstrated a method in his display of the rope through neck and then showed how that method could be used to accomplish so much more. There was no change in the secret, but the way the method could be used made each of the subsequent effects seem new and unrelated to the first.

Pavel passed a long great advice for folks like me — maybe you too — who try to invent tricks or derive methods just to fool magicians. After all, your lay audiences have no idea whether you’re forcing a card, or using a forcing deck, or just doing a card trick. Chances are the audience will never imagine that you are taking no chances and have used an one-way deck.

Pavel and One of Several Amazing Ring Tricks

Pavel: A Don’t Miss Lecture

Pavel and One of Several Amazing Ring Tricks

The man has a point. I can classic force with the best of them (meaning I’ve got about fifteen outs when I miss) but if I really need to have a particular card selected I drop back to the cross-cut force we all learned in our first read through a magic book. Pavel would say we should accomplish what we need to accomplish in the simplest method. We don’t have to make it harder than it needs to be.

In fact, most of his effects used very little sleight of hand. When sleights were used, they made sense and seemed natural. There was nothing shown that couldn’t be learned — that’s quite a contrast to some of the more sophisticated finger-flickers’ lectures I’ve paid to see.

I came to see his rope magic and he did not disappoint me or the rest of the jam-packed audience. (There was only one seat left to be had and that was in the front row. I interrupted Pavel’s lecture to sit down and he was very gracious to offer to repeat all that he had done for my benefit — I think he was joking).

He provided a short history of how he learned rope magic and his basic principles of making a rope trick. A rope is either gimmicked or not. But to the audience, there is no difference. You should, then, use the method that allows you to present the effect cleanly and allows you confidence in your presentation.

I had a chance to speak with Pavel during the intermission. This is a man that invented so many amazing effects and changed the face of magic his approach towards presentation and yet he was so approachable and helpful. He took the time to discuss his tour, his ideas for new effects and his enjoyment of our art.

He told me he had just finished his 40 days of lectures across the United States and spent four days at a magic convention before heading to Cleveland and finally to the heart of the Magic World, Michigan. Lectures and shows, he said, are not work; they are what he loves to do. Getting to and from lectures, staying in a new hotel every night and flying from town to town does get tiring.

But then with a twinkle in his eye, he said, “but I am so glad I came here tonight.” I think every audience says the same about him.